Dàshèng guǎngbǎi lùn shìlùn 大乘廣百論釋論
Mahāyāna Commentary on the Extensive Hundred-Verse Treatise (Dharmapāla’s commentary on the latter half of the Catuḥśataka) by 聖天菩薩 (Shèngtiān púsà / Āryadeva, 本), 護法菩薩 (Hùfǎ púsà / Dharmapāla, 釋), and 玄奘 (Xuánzàng, 譯)
About the work
A ten-fascicle Tang-period translation by 玄奘 of 護法菩薩 Dharmapāla’s Catuḥśatakaśāstravṛtti — the prose commentary on the latter half of Āryadeva’s Catuḥśataka, comprising 160 verses in eight chapters with extended Yogācāra-Madhyamaka doctrinal exegesis. T1571 includes the verses from KR6m0014 T1570 inset within the prose; the two texts are conventionally read together. Translated at Cháng’ān in Yǒnghuī 永徽 1 (650 CE) — the same year as T1570 — by Xuánzàng, working from a manuscript brought back from Nālandā during his 629–645 pilgrimage and corresponding to the same prose-commentary preserved in Tibetan as Tōh. 3865.
Structural Division
CANWWW gives this text without an internal subdivisions block; it follows the chapter structure of KR6m0014 T1570 (eight chapters: refutation of permanence, self, time, views, sense-faculty and object, extreme grasps, conditioned marks, and instruction of disciples). Related texts per CANWWW: KR6m0012 Bǎi lùn 百論 (T30n1569), KR6m0014 Guǎngbǎi lùn běn 廣百論本 (T30n1570).
Abstract
T1571 represents the principal extant body of late-Indic Yogācāra-Madhyamaka commentarial literature in Chinese. Dharmapāla was the principal Yogācāra master at Nālandā in the mid-sixth century and the figure through whom Xuánzàng’s preceptor 戒賢 Śīlabhadra received his Yogācāra training; his commentary on Āryadeva represents the late-Indic synthesis in which Yogācāra masters habitually wrote on Mādhyamaka root-texts and developed their interpretation in dialogue with the Mādhyamaka tradition.
The opening verse of T1571 — “I bow my head to the wonderful wisdom like the orb of the sun” 稽首妙慧如日輪 — is Xuánzàng’s rendering of the maṅgalaśloka of Dharmapāla’s commentary, and is one of the few places in the Xuánzàng corpus where the translator’s rendering of Indic poetic metre is fully formal. The body of the commentary works through the eight chapters of the Catuḥśataka’s second half, supplying lengthy doctrinal exegesis from a Yogācāra perspective that is doctrinally close to (and in places overlaps with) the contemporary KR6n0005 Chéng wéishì lùn 成唯識論 (T1585).
The Tang Mādhyamaka exegetical tradition treated the Catuḥśataka + Dharmapāla commentary (T1570 + T1571) as the polemical-doctrinal complement to Bhāviveka’s Prajñāpradīpa on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (KR6m0004 T1566); together these three Tang Mādhyamaka translations cover the full programme of Indic Mādhyamaka commentarial literature available in Chinese. Modern scholarship (Tillemans, Lang, Saito) has produced careful comparative editions of T1571 with the Tibetan witness (Tōh. 3865) and the surviving Sanskrit fragments.
Translations and research
- Tillemans, Tom J. F. Materials for the Study of Āryadeva, Dharmapāla and Candrakīrti. 2 vols. Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 24. Vienna, 1990. (Foundational comparative study and partial translation of T1571.)
- Lang, Karen C. Āryadeva on the Bodhisattva’s Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge. Indiske Studier 7. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1986. (Substantial discussion of T1571 as Yogācāra commentary on the Catuḥśataka.)
- Saigusa Mitsuyoshi 三枝充悳. Aaryadeva no kenkyū アーリヤデーヴァの研究. Tōkyō: Daisanbunmeisha, 1985.
- Hattori Masaaki 服部正明. “Dharmapāla and Bhāviveka.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 4 (1976): 109–122.
- Saito Akira 斎藤明. “Dharmapāla on the Catuḥśataka IX.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 23 (2000): 313–328.
Other points of interest
T1571 is one of the principal Tang-period sources for Indic yogācāra-madhyamaka synthetic doctrine in Chinese. The text offers a principal-disciple’s reading of Mādhyamaka in which the doctrinal entailments of emptiness are systematically expounded under Yogācāra categories — the trisvabhāva, the ālaya-vijñāna, the bodhipakṣa path-categories — without abandoning the basic Mādhyamaka commitment to non-essentialism. The work is therefore especially valuable for the study of late-Indic Buddhist scholasticism on its own terms.
Links
- CBETA
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (655): [ T ] T = CBETA [Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association]. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. Edited by Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭. Tokyo: Taishō shinshū daizōkyō kankōkai/Daizō shuppan, 1924-1932. CBReader v 5.0, 2014. https://dazangthings.nz/cbc/source/1/